Seamus Heaney - To Pablo Neruda in Tamlaghtduff - Poetry Analysis

To Pablo Neruda in Tamlaghtduff Heaney provides a second example of ‘erotic’ pleasure in the newly discovered sense of ‘Fiddleheads’. The poem describes how something exquisite can come from something that is unlovely. The speaker has received a gift from a local acquaintance: crab-apple jelly made from crabs off the tree/ That grew at Duff’s Corner in fact still grows there. The product is greeted with some incredulity: a tree I never once saw/ with crab apples on it. The speaker’s visual memory of the tree is as unfavourable as can be: Contrary, unflowery/ sky whisk and bristle, more/ twig fret than fruit fort; a cantankerous tree that showed no sign of fertility or fruit, was shaped like an implement used to scare off flies or kitchen utensil and resembled an unprepossessing haphazard criss-cross fretwork of twigs. Knowing the jelly’s provenance he can anticipate only sourness from a tree […read more….]